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Friends,

Last week was a fantastic week of learning for me. The Recruitment Agency Expo - despite some technical hiccoughs - was a triumph. I was especially encouraged to see the degree of innovation taking place in the agency space, from both business owners and technology providers. I’ll be writing about this some more in This Week, In Recruiting tomorrow, so follow on there if you want to get a deeper dive on my thoughts.

I also had the honour of hosting Betterworks Empower HR summit, which included some outstanding presentations and discussions from the likes of Katie King MBE, Tim Ringo, Stacia Garr and others. Lets just say my skepticism on SBH-SBO may have abated somewhat 🤣

Finally, last Friday saw a superb interactive presentation and interview with Juan Herrera at HackerRank who discussed latest findings on the Developer Skills market. Fascinating to know how developers are thinking about their jobs in the advent of AI.

Biggest lesson of all? Participate in events, on and offline. Don’t just rely on this newsletter for your market intel - get it from a variety of sources! Big List of Recruiting & HR Events to attend in 2024 is here - bookmark it and go to a few of these!

Thanks to: Eugène van den Hemel, Joey NK Koksal, Gautam Ghosh, Andrew Spence, Gordon Dudley, Juliana Park, Sophie Giorgobiani, Robin Choy, Jon Brooks, Rachel Meakins, Paul Daley, Marc Ang, Tania Ray, Dan Doherty, John Salt, John Kim, Tim Sanchez, Colin Donnery, Oonagh Clarke and Kevin Green - your public endorsement is essential to the growth of this newsletter! Scores updated in the Brainfood Hall of Fame 👊.

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Share Recruiting Brainfood

What Do Brainfooders Think?

So I am guessing by the low number of votes that this was generally not a topic which particularly motivated the community 🤣. Still, a clear winner on those who did vote, so the idea of a community member taking over that spot and sending their original writing to 45,000 people might be worth doing. Let me come up with a way to collect submissions on this and we’ll get ‘Guest Cook’ rolling 👊

Brainfood Live On Air - Ep251 - Innovation In High Volume Hiring: Cheaper, Faster, Better? Wednesday 27th March, 2pm GMT

So the big news is that we’re moving this week’s brainfood live from our Friday slot to Wednesday, seeing as it’s Good Friday and a long Easter Weekend. We’ve got an amazing topic to discuss - what we can learn from innovation in high volume hiring - when you have no choice but to innovate, as old ways aren’t going to get you 10,000 hires in a month! Some great stories here and hopefully something we can all learn. We’re on Weds 27th March, 2pm GMT - register here

The Brainfood

1. Scrolling Through Chaos: The Founders Guide to Building and Leading Teams from 0 to 1000

When brainfooder Lars Schmidt shared this resource into the online community last week, I knew before I clicked that it would be a great resource. Produced by Index Ventures, it is a collection of knowledge and insight from 1000’s of successful venture backed businesses. Refreshingly free from HR-speak, this is banging content - great resource to have and share, especially if you are in startup / scaleup.

RECRUITMENT OPERATIONS

2. The Global AI Talent Tracker

Macropolo produce a fantastic talent tracker on AI - looking at which institutions in which countries produce the talent and then tracking where they end up. No question that the acquisition of elite level AI skills must be considered to be a national priority for any country seriously in the AI game. Useful for recruiters, includes lists of top Universities which have been producing this talent.

AI

3. EU AI Act Compliance Checker

With the EU AI Act coming into force earlier this month, makers and users of software which have some AI component will need to be in compliant with the national interpretations of the directive. It has the potential to be an almighty ball ache so pretty handy to have this compliance checker that can at least give you some idea as where you stand in the face of the regulatory power of the EU. H/T to brainfooder Stanislaw Wasowicz for the share in the online community

AI

4. Wellness Surveillance Makes Workers Unwell

Cory Doctorow has long had the laudable habit of raising interesting questions which challenge ingrained beliefs. Here he makes the case that our current imperative to improve the wellness of our workforce may actually be having the opposite effect, because we employees negatively react to being surveilled. What do we think - how do we balance our need to know more about our staff, without invading their privacy? A Brainfood Live topic perhaps…

CULTURE

5. The Cost of Money is Part of the Cost of Living

Larry Summers - an American economists and former US Head of the Treasury in the Clinton administration - caused a huge stir last week with this tweet thread which might prove the most cogent explanation for the dissonance between the ‘economy is doing great’ mantra of today’s US political and media elites vs the lived experience of many American citizens: there is a huge undercounting of the inflation rate, due to cost of credit being progressively removed from the calculus. Turns out, mortgages, car payments, credit card debt is a major part of the cost of living….

ECONOMY

6. Hollywood is Broken

With the news this week that Hollywood studios are in discussions with OpenAI on text-to-video product SORA.ai, this video collage from a movie producer TikToker is timely and poignant. If we wanted to know what industry wide disintermediation looks like, it will be something like this.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

7. HubSpot The State of Marketing 2024

What is working in marketing? HubSpot’s annual survey of marketers is another one of those must reads, because what happens in marketing typically flows into recruitment down the road. AI enablement is a key theme here, as is influencer marketing and - as ever - the need for personalisation. Easy reading, download it here. H/T to brainfooder Martyn Redstone for the share in the online community

CONTENT MARKETING

8. Working Hours

Fascinating reconstruction on the working hours of populations over time, with the narrative being that technology has indeed released humanity from overwork, and will increasingly do the tech we add. The analysis omits one hugely significant factor though - the entry of women into the tracked labour force - which may have dispersed the measured labour more evenly across more individuals, rather than concentrating them in male labour vs unmeasured female labour. Anyways, tis interesting with nice interactives too.

SOCIETY

9. Is It Too Late Now to Say Sorry? …Cause I’m Missing More Than Just Your Money

Do you measure your employee boomerang rate? Maybe you should if you want to get a gauge of your EB / EE. Some interesting research on Reveliolabs which outlines the sectors which have the highest number of employees who had previously worked for their employer (Accommodation / Food Services), what that rate is 5.4% and how having high boomerang rate correlates with employee ratings of the company. Fun read

CULTURE

10. Users ditch Glassdoor, Stunned by Site Adding Real Names without Consent

Talking about employee ratings, employer review site Glassdoor suffered what may become a terminal crisis last week, as users delete their accounts (and reviews) for fear that their real ID’s may be connected with their anonymous reviews. There is alarmism here, as it turns out real names were not publicly revealed but internally connected via a 3rd party app - likely an attempt by Glassdoor to privately validate anonymous user comments - but the scandal has taken hold and its easy to see how bad this can get for Glassdoor. For employers, there may be ratings impact as users delete their reviews - worth checking out if this is important part of your EB.

EMPLOYER BRANDING

The Podcasts

11. Why Women Are Leaving Goldman Sachs

This is an interesting conversation on D&I on multiple levels - in the end, the host and guest conclude that Goldman Sachs stated ambition of promoting women to top jobs was about optics, and now having failed to create credible internal successor from the women partners in the company, the optics are really bad. Give it a listen, found myself with plenty of brainfood. H/T to brainfooder Bas van de Haterd for the share

D&I

12. Development Futures: Richard Baldwin on how Globalisation and Robotics will Impact Developing Economies

Richard Baldwin is a very interesting economist who studies globalisation, with a particular focus on how technology creates arbitrage opportunities for companies who want to optimise. His argument here in this 30 minute podcast is that knowledge workers in emerging economies will be the big winners of the shift to remote. I particularly like his term ‘tele-migrants’. Worth a listen and Richard, very much worth a follow on X and LinkedIn.

REMOTE WORKING

13. GTC March 2024 Keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang

There probably isn’t a more admired CEO at the moment than NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, whose big gamble a decade ago that AI chips not only saved the then struggling company but has since catapulted it into maybe the most important company in the world. Full keynote of the March GTC here.

WORKFORCE AUTOMATION

End Note

It’s Easter Week and I suspect a short week for most of us here. I hope you all get some time off and if you do have a long weekend, do enjoy the time away from computer and work and come back refreshed for the Spring to come.

In fact, this might be a pretty good poll to do this week - how are you going to spending the extra time off this week?

That’s it - thanks for reading

Have a great week everybody

Hung